Maude

by Donna Foley Mabry

I closed my eyes and imagined my baby could hear my voice. “I’m going to love you and take care of you the best I know how. I’m going to make you little dresses and gowns with flowers stitched on them, and when your hair gets long enough, if it doesn’t curl on its own, I’m going to wind it up in curls every night.” I patted my tummy and the precious life inside it and smiled to myself. I was so happy.

I’d already been an orphan, a wife, and a mother. Now I was a widow. I was only three months past my sixteenth birthday.

‘Maude Connor was my best friend from the day I got to this town, and if you think you’re going to disgrace her by taking her out on a buggy ride with no chaperone and then leaving her here without marrying her, you got another think coming. I’ll cut your throat in your sleep before I’ll let that happen, even if I have to come all the way to Kennett, Missouri to find you.’

I ran my fingertips over the dress with the embroidered white flowers that I made for my wedding to James and laid it out on the bed. There was no way I could bring myself to wear that. It would be like committing adultery on James. I took James’s plaid shirt I’d worn the day he died. I hadn’t washed it since. I held it up to my face and breathed in deep, hoping to catch a trace of his scent, but it had faded away. Then I folded it up inside the wedding dress and packed them in the cedar chest Tommy made me. They were the only parts left of the dream James and I had lived.

He said, “Maude, it’s been a long day. Let’s get some rest,” and he turned his back to me. Within a minute, his breathing told me he was fast asleep. I lay next to him for a while before I relaxed and drifted off to sleep, wondering what manner of man I’d married.

What I did miss, what I pined for, was affection. James had held my hand when we walked together, stopped to kiss my neck when he passed behind my chair, sometimes just wrapped his arms around me and gently held me next to him. I would relax my body against his and feel that I understood the true bond of marriage. George never touched me for anything but the relations. Not anything. It seemed to me that he went out of his way to keep from touching me.

The pain never really goes away. It gets better, and you finally get to a place where you aren’t thinking about it every minute of every day.

As we plodded along, I mourned my spurt of temper. My neck felt naked and somehow exposed to the point of indecency.

Looking back on it now, I think the laughing did more to feed my soul where I was hungry than the food did.